Hunt-Morgan House

Aunt Betty James, nursemaid to the Morgan children, still appears to sick kids on the third floor of this 1814 Lexington mansion.

A nurse fell asleep at the bedside of a sick Morgan child and woke to see a Black woman in a turban and red leather shoes standing over the bed, stroking the child's forehead and humming a nursery rhyme. When the nurse moved, the woman disappeared. The child died anyway. Mrs. Morgan recognized the shoes. They belonged to Aunt Betty, who had been dead for years.

Aunt Betty is the most-reported ghost at the Hunt-Morgan House, a Federal mansion at 201 North Mill Street in Lexington's Gratz Park district. Her full name was Bouviette James. The family also called her Mammy Bouviette or Mam B'et. She was the nursemaid to the Morgan children through the mid-nineteenth century, and when she died in 1870, Charlton Morgan and his brothers served as her pallbearers and the family buried her in the family plot. For a Black woman in Kentucky five years after the Civil War, that was nearly unheard of. John Hunt Morgan had given her a pair of distinctive red leather shoes during her life. She's wearing them in every sighting.

She shows up most often on the third floor, in the old nursery and the hallways around it. She appears most often when children are sick. The pattern is always the same: she hums, she strokes the child's forehead, and she vanishes if anyone else in the room moves toward her. Mrs. Morgan came to see it as comfort rather than something to fear. If a child died, Aunt Betty was still on the job.

The house has another ghost too, older and less nuanced. John Wesley Hunt built Hopemont in 1814. He'd moved to Lexington from Richmond, Virginia, in 1795, and by the time he died he had become the first millionaire west of the Allegheny Mountains, off a mix of mercantile trade, thoroughbred breeding, hemp manufacturing, banking, and insurance. Cholera got him in 1849, during the epidemic that ripped through Lexington that summer. His ghost walks the halls of the house he built. Staff and visitors describe a figure moving through the formal rooms like he still lives there. Which, by one definition, he does.

Hunt's grandson Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan grew up in the house. The "Thunderbolt of the Confederacy" was killed in Greeneville, Tennessee, in 1864 at thirty-nine. His great-grandson Thomas Hunt Morgan was born in the house in 1866 and grew up to win the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for proving that genes sit on chromosomes. A first-millionaire, a cavalry general, a Nobel laureate, and Aunt Betty. Not a bad roster for one building.

The house was saved from demolition in 1955 and is now a museum run by the Blue Grass Trust, furnished with original Hunt and Morgan pieces, with the Alexander T. Hunt Civil War Museum inside. Tours move through the first two floors. The third floor is where the sightings cluster. The red shoes are still the tell.